For many ambitious professionals, an exhausting regime is the only way to
succeed

My generation grew up thinking – and being told by parents, teachers and the media – that if we got a job at an investment bank and worked really hard, we’d never have to worry. We could have it all: the fast car, the loft apartment, the yacht, the Caribbean holidays, the glamorous girlfriend or boyfriend. And the best part? We wouldn’t even have to do it forever – just long enough to earn a fortune and then we could do what we really wanted in our thirties or forties. It was the American dream in the City of London.

Moritz Erhardt’s father believed this avenue would be open to his son, too, revealing that Moritz’s plan was “to work really hard for a few years and to do something good afterwards”. Moritz will now never have the chance to “do something good” – the 21-year-old was nearing the end of a seven-week internship at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London when he collapsed and died at home. He had worked until 6am for three days in a row.

The “dream ending” hoped for by young people in these jobs at investment banks is for most, today, non-existent. As one trader friend of mine put it, “That old myth of being able to retire or become a chef in your forties? Don’t be crazy. Not with a mortgage this size and two kids in private school. We’re all trapped. There’s no big money to be made any more – just enough to keep you from jacking it in and doing something interesting.”

When I was Moritz Erhardt’s age, having graduated with a degree in Russian and no idea what to do next, I too was working in the City, putting in long hours as a high-yield bond broker. I was at my desk by 7am, out with investment banking clients until the early hours several nights a week, and frequently found myself standing in the shower at 5am taking long, deep breaths trying to slow my heart rate down.

For a few months, I thought it was terribly glamorous: the exhaustion, the long hours and the panic attacks all seemed a small price to pay in exchange for that magical hit of adrenaline when I traded. Even when I ended up in hospital on a drip with an acute kidney infection, and doctors told me my body’s defences were no longer functioning normally, I didn’t slow down: I eagerly resumed my abusive relationship with the trading floor as soon as I could. I still felt invincible. After all, when you’re in your early twenties, and you know you won’t be working like this forever, what’s the worst that can happen?

And, of course, nobody forced me to do any of it. I was not even driven by extreme poverty, like the tragic seamstress Mary Anne Walkley, whose death from overwork in 1863 so scandalised contemporary society that she made it into Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. When I came in a bit late or left a little earlier, I doubt anyone really cared. Nor could I claim I was doing it out of heroism or some higher purpose. The only person I was really impressing with my all-nighters was me. All the shots of espresso, the cat naps taken in toilet cubicles, and the heart palpitations that I wore like some sick badge of honour while staying late to fill in yet another spreadsheet, went largely unnoticed and were of comparatively little use to the world.

No, all the pressure, expectation and desire to outperform my colleagues came from somewhere within, as I can imagine it did for Moritz Erhardt – star pupil, sportsman, perfect intern. As he wrote in a now much-quoted online profile with regard to his love of sport: “Sometimes I had a tendency to be overambitious, which resulted in severe injuries.”

It could have been me or any number of my contemporaries found collapsed in a shower cubicle at 21. Mercifully, deaths from overwork or suicide from depression remain rare, but people are rarely able to “do something good” with their lives, or escape the rat race.

We may never know how many all-nighters Moritz had worked during his summer internship, and I’m sure speculation as to his cause of death will continue long after the autopsy results are in. But for too many educated young people around the world, their horizons, expectations and ambitions are limited to trying to work harder than the person next to them, because this has become the only acknowledged route to “success”. Until this changes, no amount of regulation on working hours or support networks will help very much. After all, any super-ambitious 21-year-old forced to go home at 7pm will simply continue filling in spreadsheets from their smartphone.

We would do well to remember that banks are composed of people, and are a symptom of our culture. They say every country has the government it deserves – perhaps the same could be said of the banks.